PMOs keep getting handed to leaders with a turnaround reputation and no project management background. Before we decide those executives are wrong, we should ask why they’re doing it. We may not love the answer.
Earlier this month I asked whether executives have moved past project management. Here’s the companion question: why are PMOs hiring leaders without project management experience?
I’m seeing it a lot now. A bumper crop of PMO leaders who have never run a formal project, but who arrive with a reputation for getting things done and walking organizations through change.
The problem (if you want to call it that) is that the executive who wants strategy moving and teams unstuck goes looking for someone who has already done it somewhere else. They don’t much care whether the unsticking came from good project management practice.
From their perspective, they don’t need someone who can run a project. They need someone who can run an organization, in the context of project work.
“Nobody appoints a CHRO with no HR background, or a CFO who never worked in accounting.”
It’s a pointed thing to say, and it’s mostly unique to PMOs. Nobody appoints a CHRO with no HR background, or a CFO who never worked in accounting.
So why here? Those of us in the profession often say it’s because project management is undervalued at the executive level. There’s truth in that. But ask anyone in HR and you’ll hear the same complaint. HR still gets one of their own in the top job.
I think the more accurate explanation is that executives view the PMO as a capability function, not a content function. What they want is someone skilled at moving critical, strategic work forward. If the CEO is setting direction, the PMO leader is mobilizing the organization to execute it well.
That’s a generalist’s job description. And I think they have a point.
Business acumen comes first. A PMO Director has to know where the pieces of the business touch each other, the way a sales commitment becomes an operations problem. They need to understand the psychology of how work moves and how people move. And they have to work like an internal consultant, spotting where work is slow or undisciplined and knowing what to build instead.
The modern PMO leader is figuring out how to mobilize a messy organization with an AI “workforce” now in it. The portfolio still has to run transparently enough that executives know what’s happening, when, why, and at what risk.
That’s how a CEO relates to a board. In many ways, it’s how the PMO Director relates to the CEO.
That paradigm, whether you agree with it or not, is half of why executives reach outside the profession to fill the job. The other half is what happened the last time they hired from inside.
Outsider PMO hires have a convincing advantage, and an understood vulnerability.
Outsiders are attractive partly because their weakness is public. They don’t know the formal discipline of project management, and everyone knows it before the offer goes out. What they bring instead is a willingness to break convention.
Watch what an outsider does in the first three to six months. They almost never add anything. They subtract.
They come from the business side, or from turnaround work, and that work is mostly removal. Strip out the obstacles and the bloat, see what’s left and what the stripping broke, then rebuild only what has to exist.
Executives appreciate that more than the portfolio governance a PMO usually hands them. A leader already frustrated by how slowly strategy is moving doesn’t want to watch the new hire add a bunch of new process layers (even when it’s a real slow-down-to-move-fast situation, which it often is).
Those executives also have some research on their side. Eight experiments published in Nature in 2021 found that people systematically overlook subtractive changes. Taking something away mostly doesn’t occur to us, especially when we’re busy or only get one pass at the problem. (Leidy Klotz, one of the authors, wrote the long version as Subtract.)
A PMO ends up carrying a pile of things nobody has questioned in years. An outsider walks in, sees the pile, and has no compunction about throwing stuff away, because none of it is theirs.
Career project managers have an assumed advantage, and a growing vulnerability.
The outsider gets to name their weakness on the way in. Everyone in the room knows the new director has never run a project, and everyone plans around it.
Career PMs get no such courtesy. The experience is why they were hired, so nobody thinks to ask what rides along with it. The advantage is assumed. The vulnerability slips in unnamed.
“An unnamed vulnerability is one nobody manages.”
And an unnamed vulnerability is one nobody manages. The outsider’s gap gets staffed around from day one. The career PM’s gap gets discovered late, usually by an executive who has spent a year waiting for the portfolio to move.
That executive is the one who hires an outsider next time.
Now flip it. The career PM’s vulnerability is the mirror image of the outsider’s instinct. Where an outsider subtracts, career PMs like me add. Governance, structure, artifacts, process.
See a hole in the org, reach for the practice that fills it. Nobody counts what all that adding costs to run.
That reflex is often exactly right. It’s also the half of the job an outsider will struggle with. Adding is how you build the communication an organization needs to see its own work, and no portfolio runs well without it. It’s constructive thinking. The discipline hands you practices that work most of the time, so you start with those and build new ones where they don’t fit.
Usually, the strongest PMO hire is a career PM who can do the math.
The best career PMs in the job do both halves. I’ve watched them walk in and immediately pull out the things that drove them nuts as PMs, then add what would have made a real difference back when they were running the work. Decision speed and the volume of status reporting usually go first, and they’re right to.
They also understand the perennial causes of project failure. They know what it takes to be the bridge. The business wants everything now but won’t attend the meetings or make the decisions. The executive team wants truthful reporting inside a culture where a red status earns unwanted attention.
They can often tell whether a subtraction or addition will make the function stronger or weaker. At their best they bring both the generalist’s eye for systems and the credibility it takes to lead project managers in the trenches.
The trouble starts when adding is the only thing a leader knows how to do. Some PMO directors are so worried about drifting out of step with best practice that they only add what they perceive to be missing. That’s letting best practices do the PMO’s thinking for it.
And I’ll say the harder version of that. A career PM who never learned to subtract is a riskier hire than an outsider. The outsider at least arrives with the org braced for what they can’t do.
Both can lead a PMO. Only one of them knows what they’re missing.
Look. I happen to think both types can do the job well, depending on the organization and the humility they bring to it. What separates them is rarely the size of the gap. Almost always whether anyone can see it.
The outsider’s liability is public. It gets flagged in the interview and staffed around before the person starts. The career PM’s liability is invisible, and it stays invisible until something it should have caught goes wrong.
So here’s my ranking. A career PM who has learned to subtract is the strongest of the three. A career PM who hasn’t is the biggest liability, precisely because nobody is watching for it. The outsider sits in between, which is a perfectly reasonable place to sit.
Any leadership hire is a gamble. These are just different gambles. The insider is the higher ceiling and the lower floor. The outsider is the safer bet, and I get the executives who take it. They’re usually the ones already burned by an insider who couldn’t read the label from inside the bottle.
But the job depends on adding and subtracting in roughly equal measure, and most arrive able to do only one of those well. What I’ve found is that success in the first six months comes down to one thing. Listening.
It’s the only tool that works on a liability nobody has named for you.
An outsider has one way to cover what they don’t know, and that’s listening. Career PMO leaders carry the curse of knowledge instead. They listen too, just to their own experience instead of the people in front of them.
Plenty from both camps have stopped listening altogether, and PMI has numbers on who they stopped listening to. When PMI compared what executives thought was worth investing resources in against what PMO leaders actually prioritized, customer focus (essentially, stakeholder focus, given how the report defines it) sat notably lower on the PMO’s list than on the executives’.
My own read is that we’ve tuned out the middle: cross-functional leaders, sponsors, and the departments that have to absorb the work. I worked through that research in “Who is the PMO Actually For?”.
When the natural adders listen to what needs to be subtracted, and the instinctive subtracters listen well to what is missing, the math adds up and a PMO can thrive.
If You Only Do One Thing
I started my career in project management (insider mindset), but I’m a permanent outsider for a living. I cluster in a handful of industries, but I’m regularly in a new one, at a new organization with its own quirks.
An outsider sees the PMO as it is. They weren’t there when it was built, so they have no affection for any of it.
You can borrow the vantage point. It takes about an hour.
One question, answered from five perspectives, in writing. (Do it by hand, on paper, to keep distractions out.)
“If the PMO disappeared tomorrow, what would [role] miss?”
Answer it as each of these:
- The CEO / Executive Director / President
- The project managers on your team
- The people who sponsor projects
- The people doing the work
- Your external customers, members, or clients (whichever word fits your industry)
Put the five answers side by side. Together they paint a 360-degree view of the current state. (More so if you ask these stakeholders directly instead of answering for them.)
The answers probably won’t match, and the mismatch is the finding. A thing only one role would miss is a thing you’re funding for one stakeholder, maybe at the expense of the rest. A thing nobody would miss is a thing you’re funding out of habit. And the box that comes up empty is telling you where the PMO stopped listening.
Once you’ve been through all five, fill this in.
| Top 5 Things to Subtract | Top 2 Things to Add (if any) |
|---|---|
The asymmetry is intentional. There’s no real upper limit on what you can subtract, as long as you can prove it isn’t adding value. Additions are different. Each one costs effort. Prove the return before you write it down.
One more rule as you build the lists. Judge every line against “is this working?” rather than “are we doing things right?” Those two questions produce different tables, and only one comes from an executive mindset.
So, do PMOs still need leaders with project management experience? I can’t give you a yes or a no, and I’ve stopped treating that as a dodge. Experience is worth something real, and so is arriving without it. Every leader in that job is some distance from the work, and every one shows up holding half the math. The question is whether you know which half is yours.